Berkeley Law Library, Reading Room
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
1:30 pm
We’d just completed the bar review torts lecture and I was decompressing with some past Lakers-Celtics highlights on YouTube when an older stranger with a sympathetic look on her face approached me and stated:
“I’m sorry, somebody’s complaining about the smell of your food. You’ll have to eat it outside.”
Momentarily confused, I instinctively responded:
“Okay.”
After the library staff member scurried out of the reading room, I took a look at my food: some cold bulgogi over rice with a side of kimchee in a Styrofoam take-out container. My housemate and I had retrieved some leftovers from the fridge in the law review office moments earlier.
A friend, who was sitting directly across from me at our rectangular 8-foot desk, noted what I was just beginning to observe:
“That was bullshit. I can’t even smell anything.”
Obviously I’m biased, as the accused in this case, but the only thing I could smell at that point was the vinaigrette dressing on my friend’s salad, presumably purchased from Café Zeb, just down the hall from the library.
I put my food away and thought about going outside to eat, then was suddenly struck by how easy it had been to relegate me to the position of some second-class citizen, with no basis whatsoever.
Angered, I took a look around to see who might have a problem with my food. A couple of students were quietly studying at their desks, but the rows of desks had fifteen feet of separation between them and the desks within rows were separated by a good three-and-a-half feet. Nobody was within smelling distance of my food, but my food had been open and obvious for people to see. I came to the conclusion that the complainant was actually offended by the appearance of my food, because the only perception of my lunch that anyone around me could have had would have been based on sight alone.
So who would have a problem with the way my food looked? I spotted an uptight-looking brunette, mid-30s, angrily mousing away at her laptop and seated about twenty-five feet behind me me. Maybe it was the tall blonde with his back to me and his headphones on, sitting fifteen feet away. Though in closest proximity to my food, I doubted that it was the Chinese LLM student quietly highlighting her notecards at the desk to my right—she seemed more unprepared for confrontation than even myself. This was sad, because my lack of confrontational instinct had just cost me my ability to have lunch.
After all, if I had asked the library staff member what rule was in place to justify my having to eat outside, I’m sure I would’ve little more than a blank stare as a response. The only rule I was aware of was that if one wanted to have lunch in the library, one would have to eat in the reading room and any drinks had to exist in a secured container. My LexisNexis water bottle seemed pretty secure and I’m pretty confident that I could’ve prevailed in an impromptu legal argument. However, I knew that the library staff member was just the messenger, and I felt sorry that she was forced to comply with the orders of whatever bland, super-entitled, Apple-Pie-normative law student had decided that the sight of kimchee and bulgogi in a take-out container was going to make it impossible for her to pass the bar exam and sue people like me for offending her sensibilities.
Frustrated by the subtle inequities of the modern world and by the way my cooperative instincts had just negated whatever advantage a knowledge of the law had given me, I returned to my pointless study of torts.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Homeland Security Incident at UCSB
This may be in the news in the future, but apparently Homeland Security raided the apartment of a UCSB instructor at 5am on the 23rd, and arrested her Korean roommate because she couldn't find her green card immediately.
Info from http://community.livejournal.com/ucsb/1269217.html
Info from http://community.livejournal.com/ucsb/1269217.html
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Racist DJs FIRED
Looks like justice has been served. The Organization of Chinese Americans deserves a lot of credit:
http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=261930>1=9951
http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=261930>1=9951
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Racist DJs suspended
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6589019.stm
Two CBS DJs were suspended for a racist and sexist prank call to a Chinese restaurant. This story has been rather slow to develop, so we need to make it clear to CBS these two need to be fired just like Imus.
Two CBS DJs were suspended for a racist and sexist prank call to a Chinese restaurant. This story has been rather slow to develop, so we need to make it clear to CBS these two need to be fired just like Imus.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The media is speaking out!
VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE SHOOTER DEBATE: Speculation mars discussion online
Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Initial media reports described Cho Seung-Hui -- whose shooting rampage Monday at Virginia Tech left 33 dead, including himself -- as a resident alien, an Asian and a South Korean.
On Tuesday, racially tinged speculation, based on the 23-year-old Cho's heritage and immigrant status, flew around the Internet, even though he spent two-thirds of his life in the United States.
"Yet another reason for the U.S. to further restrict immigration to this country," a user going by the name of Christabella posted on a blog at SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site. "Had they not allowed Cho to waltz into the nation on a student visa, those 33 people would still be alive."
Cho, the underlying argument went, was a foreigner.
That kind of thinking has alarmed Asian American leaders. Overemphasis in news coverage of his immigrant status, and stereotyping in general, could influence perceptions of all Asian Americans -- not only Koreans -- especially in areas with little connection to Asians and Asian Americans, said Eric Mar, a San Francisco school board member who is Chinese American.
The Asian American Journalists Association, headquartered in San Francisco, questioned stories and online comments posted Tuesday morning that highlighted Cho's race and immigration status because that emphasis suggested those factors played a role in the shootings.
In fact, Cho was like many school shooters -- about three-quarters of whom have been white boys and young men, according to a 2000 report from the U.S. Secret Service. Cho appeared to feel marginalized and angry, according to criminologists and psychologists such as Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Born in South Korea, Cho, 23, immigrated as a child to the United States in 1992. He was raised in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the son of a couple who worked at a dry-cleaning business. He was sullen and depressed, an English major whose twisted fiction concerned faculty and a fan of bloody shooting games, according to media reports.
"A useful way to think about this is, 'How connected might an individual feel to a community and a society?' " said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. "Sometimes the barriers might be racial, sometimes it might be language. Sometimes it might be their own mental health that prevents them from forming bonds."
The public is attempting to make sense of the tragedy by categorizing Cho and his motivations, said James Garbarino, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of "Lost Boys: Why Our Boys Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them."
People have "an impulse to distance themselves" from the campus killer, Garbarino said. "The more someone is like one of us, the harder it is to sleep."
Some of the people posting to blogs and chat rooms online Tuesday blamed Cho's actions on his "foreign" status. Others dismissed such arguments as preposterous and asserted that the massacre resulted from easy access to guns, violence in the media or the popularity of violent video games. Still others theorized he was a member of al Qaeda, carrying out a terrorist attack. He was an English-as-a-second-language student depressed about finals, according to another theory.
Indeed, commentators' theories may say more about them than about the gunman.
"It's a psychological protective technique," said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "This is about gun control, or immigration, or not allowing guns on campus. People are painting the picture."
E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/MNG7EPAN4P1.DTL
Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Initial media reports described Cho Seung-Hui -- whose shooting rampage Monday at Virginia Tech left 33 dead, including himself -- as a resident alien, an Asian and a South Korean.
On Tuesday, racially tinged speculation, based on the 23-year-old Cho's heritage and immigrant status, flew around the Internet, even though he spent two-thirds of his life in the United States.
"Yet another reason for the U.S. to further restrict immigration to this country," a user going by the name of Christabella posted on a blog at SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site. "Had they not allowed Cho to waltz into the nation on a student visa, those 33 people would still be alive."
Cho, the underlying argument went, was a foreigner.
That kind of thinking has alarmed Asian American leaders. Overemphasis in news coverage of his immigrant status, and stereotyping in general, could influence perceptions of all Asian Americans -- not only Koreans -- especially in areas with little connection to Asians and Asian Americans, said Eric Mar, a San Francisco school board member who is Chinese American.
The Asian American Journalists Association, headquartered in San Francisco, questioned stories and online comments posted Tuesday morning that highlighted Cho's race and immigration status because that emphasis suggested those factors played a role in the shootings.
In fact, Cho was like many school shooters -- about three-quarters of whom have been white boys and young men, according to a 2000 report from the U.S. Secret Service. Cho appeared to feel marginalized and angry, according to criminologists and psychologists such as Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Born in South Korea, Cho, 23, immigrated as a child to the United States in 1992. He was raised in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the son of a couple who worked at a dry-cleaning business. He was sullen and depressed, an English major whose twisted fiction concerned faculty and a fan of bloody shooting games, according to media reports.
"A useful way to think about this is, 'How connected might an individual feel to a community and a society?' " said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. "Sometimes the barriers might be racial, sometimes it might be language. Sometimes it might be their own mental health that prevents them from forming bonds."
The public is attempting to make sense of the tragedy by categorizing Cho and his motivations, said James Garbarino, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of "Lost Boys: Why Our Boys Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them."
People have "an impulse to distance themselves" from the campus killer, Garbarino said. "The more someone is like one of us, the harder it is to sleep."
Some of the people posting to blogs and chat rooms online Tuesday blamed Cho's actions on his "foreign" status. Others dismissed such arguments as preposterous and asserted that the massacre resulted from easy access to guns, violence in the media or the popularity of violent video games. Still others theorized he was a member of al Qaeda, carrying out a terrorist attack. He was an English-as-a-second-language student depressed about finals, according to another theory.
Indeed, commentators' theories may say more about them than about the gunman.
"It's a psychological protective technique," said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "This is about gun control, or immigration, or not allowing guns on campus. People are painting the picture."
E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/MNG7EPAN4P1.DTL
Chung: Asian-Americans dread backlash in wake of Va. Tech carnage
By L.A. Chung Mercury News Columnist San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:04/18/2007 10:03:01 AM PDT
All day Monday, reeling from the unfolding carnage on the pastoral campus of Virginia Tech, I wondered the same thing everyone else did: Who was this shooter? Why did he do it?
When I awoke the next morning, the name of the perpetrator of the nation's worst mass murder was all over the news, and I had another reaction: Oh, no. He's Asian.
Actually, there was a collective flinch out there among Asian-Americans.
Twenty-three-year-old Seung Cho, a troubled student raised in the well-to-do suburbs ringing Washington, D.C., reportedly left a note railing against "rich kids" and "deceitful charlatans." School officials identified him as Cho Seung-Hui in the order his name would appear in South Korea, where he was born.
Now, Cho may be just the name of a guy described as "a loner" who barely spoke in class, but for a number of us, he has a face that looks like our brothers, cousins and friends. That association alone is unsettling.
Mai Hoang, a former Oakland resident, remembered vividly - and with the same flinch - the 1991 hostage-taking and siege of the Good Guys store in Sacramento that involved three Vietnamese brothers and another Vietnamese youth. Six people died, including three of the gunmen, and 11 were wounded. With the large Vietnamese population in Virginia and the shootings taking place in the engineering building, she was afraid this bloodbath was at the hands of a Vietnamese-American student.
"I felt terrible for being relieved on behalf of my community he wasn't," she said.
How does one explain this jumble of revulsion, shame, sadness - and empathy for his parents - that arises among Asian-Americans? It's hard to articulate, but it does.
Elaine Kim, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, said she has received all kinds of e-mail from concerned Korean-Americans.
"Everyone is sensitive to it, worried about it," Kim said. "I said, `Don't take responsibility for it. You have nothing to do with it!'"
Among minorities, we're not alone.
A black colleague once shared his unvoiced reaction when the Washington, D.C., area snipers John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested four years ago: "Oh, damn it, they're black!"
Local Muslims report having similar feelings when violence breaks out, hoping silently that no Muslim is involved.
Kim said one of her e-mails Tuesday came from a young Jewish man who first stated, "I remember being disappointed that Dylan Klebold was Jewish," referring to one of the teen shooters of the infamous Columbine High School massacre. "And he asked what I thought about Cho being Korean," Kim said.
I can't say I know a single white male who read about Jeffrey Dahmer's serial killing and thought, "Oh, no, another white guy" - FBI criminal personality profiles notwithstanding.
As minorities, we all feel that we have to "represent," to use the modern phrase. That we have to show that our people are normal - shocked like everyone else, saddened like everyone else - and that we stand for sanity, for decency and, yes, as obvious as it is, that we have utmost sympathy for the victims' families.
We feel the need to represent - and also to distance ourselves. First up was the government of South Korea, which expressed its shock and condolences. The Korean American Coalition in Washington, D.C., extended its sympathies "on behalf of the Korean community" and announced a memorial fund for the bereaved Virginia Tech families.
It comes out of genuine concern. And out of fear of a backlash.
We're afraid others are only going to see the Asian part of the shooter's identity. Or his immigration status. We're afraid that the violence will somehow be ascribed to his Korean-ness, or that his legal permanent residency - as repeatedly mentioned in news reports - is relevant to his mad actions.
"They keep saying he's a `Korean national,' but he's been here since he was 8," said Hoang, the news editor who contributed to the blog, "Trip Master Monkey," a posting about the backlash. "He's Americanized."
Now and in coming days, this tragedy will spark discussions about campus security, gun control, mental health care. Hopefully, we can all recognize the red flags his professors and others saw.
Lucinda Roy, director of the creative writing department, described in a New York Times opinion piece the coming together of races, black and white, on the campus over the tragedy.
Playwriting classmate Ian McFarlane posted on AOL News his wish that by releasing Cho's plays, "... this might help people start caring about others no matter how weird they might seem because if this was some kind of cry for attention, then he should have gotten it a long time ago."
Perhaps all will see themselves as a community devastated by madness, not color.
Contact L.A. Chung at lchung@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5280.
Article Launched:04/18/2007 10:03:01 AM PDT
All day Monday, reeling from the unfolding carnage on the pastoral campus of Virginia Tech, I wondered the same thing everyone else did: Who was this shooter? Why did he do it?
When I awoke the next morning, the name of the perpetrator of the nation's worst mass murder was all over the news, and I had another reaction: Oh, no. He's Asian.
Actually, there was a collective flinch out there among Asian-Americans.
Twenty-three-year-old Seung Cho, a troubled student raised in the well-to-do suburbs ringing Washington, D.C., reportedly left a note railing against "rich kids" and "deceitful charlatans." School officials identified him as Cho Seung-Hui in the order his name would appear in South Korea, where he was born.
Now, Cho may be just the name of a guy described as "a loner" who barely spoke in class, but for a number of us, he has a face that looks like our brothers, cousins and friends. That association alone is unsettling.
Mai Hoang, a former Oakland resident, remembered vividly - and with the same flinch - the 1991 hostage-taking and siege of the Good Guys store in Sacramento that involved three Vietnamese brothers and another Vietnamese youth. Six people died, including three of the gunmen, and 11 were wounded. With the large Vietnamese population in Virginia and the shootings taking place in the engineering building, she was afraid this bloodbath was at the hands of a Vietnamese-American student.
"I felt terrible for being relieved on behalf of my community he wasn't," she said.
How does one explain this jumble of revulsion, shame, sadness - and empathy for his parents - that arises among Asian-Americans? It's hard to articulate, but it does.
Elaine Kim, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, said she has received all kinds of e-mail from concerned Korean-Americans.
"Everyone is sensitive to it, worried about it," Kim said. "I said, `Don't take responsibility for it. You have nothing to do with it!'"
Among minorities, we're not alone.
A black colleague once shared his unvoiced reaction when the Washington, D.C., area snipers John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested four years ago: "Oh, damn it, they're black!"
Local Muslims report having similar feelings when violence breaks out, hoping silently that no Muslim is involved.
Kim said one of her e-mails Tuesday came from a young Jewish man who first stated, "I remember being disappointed that Dylan Klebold was Jewish," referring to one of the teen shooters of the infamous Columbine High School massacre. "And he asked what I thought about Cho being Korean," Kim said.
I can't say I know a single white male who read about Jeffrey Dahmer's serial killing and thought, "Oh, no, another white guy" - FBI criminal personality profiles notwithstanding.
As minorities, we all feel that we have to "represent," to use the modern phrase. That we have to show that our people are normal - shocked like everyone else, saddened like everyone else - and that we stand for sanity, for decency and, yes, as obvious as it is, that we have utmost sympathy for the victims' families.
We feel the need to represent - and also to distance ourselves. First up was the government of South Korea, which expressed its shock and condolences. The Korean American Coalition in Washington, D.C., extended its sympathies "on behalf of the Korean community" and announced a memorial fund for the bereaved Virginia Tech families.
It comes out of genuine concern. And out of fear of a backlash.
We're afraid others are only going to see the Asian part of the shooter's identity. Or his immigration status. We're afraid that the violence will somehow be ascribed to his Korean-ness, or that his legal permanent residency - as repeatedly mentioned in news reports - is relevant to his mad actions.
"They keep saying he's a `Korean national,' but he's been here since he was 8," said Hoang, the news editor who contributed to the blog, "Trip Master Monkey," a posting about the backlash. "He's Americanized."
Now and in coming days, this tragedy will spark discussions about campus security, gun control, mental health care. Hopefully, we can all recognize the red flags his professors and others saw.
Lucinda Roy, director of the creative writing department, described in a New York Times opinion piece the coming together of races, black and white, on the campus over the tragedy.
Playwriting classmate Ian McFarlane posted on AOL News his wish that by releasing Cho's plays, "... this might help people start caring about others no matter how weird they might seem because if this was some kind of cry for attention, then he should have gotten it a long time ago."
Perhaps all will see themselves as a community devastated by madness, not color.
Contact L.A. Chung at lchung@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5280.
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